In this political season, there is one question that needs no poll: Rahil Prakash is a liar. The other thing we know is that he will likely get away with spreading fake polling results. Lies can be protected speech under the First Amendment and, while Prakash would not likely want to take a popularity poll, he is unlikely to face legal consequences for his “short-term social experiment.”
We still do not know much about the twenty-one-year-old college graduate who reportedly admitted to releasing fake polling in the last election cycle.
What we do know is that he succeeded and such polls can influence critical campaign decisions. For example, his poll put Democratic Socialist up by 20 points in Wisconsin and she surprised many by spending the final days campaigning in rural areas where she was expected to do worse. (She would lose by less than one percent of the vote). It is unclear where, had Hong known how close the race was, she would have spent the final days in higher-yield urban districts.
The story laid bare the vulnerability of modern polling, which was again wildly wrong in predictions in various races during the primaries. However, it also highlights a novel question of potential liability for knowingly spreading falsehoods. In this case, Prakash wanted the lie to spread and likely succeeded beyond his wildest imagination.
He told The Guardian that “I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily. And as it turned out, it could.” He created a website called Median Strategies and released fake polls in Democrat primaries in the Wisconsin governor’s race, the Los Angeles mayoral race, and two statewide Nevada races. The polls were quickly picked up and spread throughout the “ecosystem.”
He explained to the Guardian how easy it was: “I think my overall takeaway was that if you just make it look a bit pretty, it’s rather easy for it to spread.”
We do not know if Prakash had a political motive in showing certain candidates dominating in certain races.
He reportedly denied using his fake polls to play betting sites as part of the prediction market. He also denied being compensated or directed by any campaign to run the hoax.
That matters because using lies for financial gain can be a form of fraud. However, just being a liar is protected.
The Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act. In United States v. Alvarez, the Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act and held 6-3 that it is unconstitutional to criminalize lies.
The case shows the dividing line. Xavier Alvarez was protected in claiming to have won the Congressional Medal of Honor as well as marrying a Mexican movie star, playing for the Detroit Red Wings, and rescuing the ambassador in the Iranian hostage crisis. However, if he had used those claims to receive veteran benefits or donations, he could have been prosecuted.
Many of us in the free speech community supported that decision and still oppose censorship systems that target what governments decide is disinformation, misinformation, or malinformation. Anti-free speech figures have long justified censorship by declaring views as false or dangerous.
While apologizing to a few campaigns for misleading them, Prakash still seems perfectly clueless about the ethics and impact of lying in elections. Indeed, he seems to entirely remove himself from the problem of spreading lies: “I hope it gives a really good lesson going forward in that we need to be very serious about these things and very serious in how, if one person can do this, what can a serious operation do in the future – a real, you know, operation for an organization, country, whatever.”
Yeah, whatever.
The most revealing aspect of this controversy is not that some polling seems to lack any factual foundation for its predictions, but that some people lack any moral foundation for their actions. We have seen similar sites put out fake stories. Some do so for political ends, while others want to laugh at those gullible enough to trust them.
As with anonymous positions, the Internet gives people a certain license to say and do things that they would not do in their own name. Unlike Prakash, most are not exposed. They spread vicious, false stories and relish their sense of twisted power. While lacking the courage to speak in their own names (often in attacking those who have the courage to do so), they yield to their darkest or cruelest inclinations.
Prakash created a fake site to make it seem like this was not an anonymous, unreliable source. He found his chumps in the media who wanted to report the results without looking into the source. However, the “really good lesson” was missed by him: he was neither noble nor particularly clever, just another liar among the Internet’s sad voyeurs and vagabonds.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
If lies are protected speech, might now lying for financial gain, fraud, soon be legal. I hope not.
Does anyone else see the hypocrisy about attributing lies about polling to the “left” while the person with the biggest megaphone and not on the left does it daily? Condemn away but by overlooking Trump and the media that repeats everything he says as if it were true, you look silly.
“We’re leading in every poll — and not by a little, by a lot.” Donald Trump –Pennsylvania Rally July 202
“The numbers are incredible. We’re winning with independents, winning with Hispanics, winning everywhere.” Donald Trump –Truth Social June 2026
Wasn’t this same thing already done in 2016 in an attempt to benefit Hillary Clinton?
I saw the news about Prakash yesterday morning and it cemented in my mind that we today face three unchained, unchallenged, and expanding mass communication concerns:
(1) fake polls, poll herding, selective poll sources and respondents, and calculatingly-leading poll questions to affect voting.
(2) increasingly manipulative and selective fact-reporting and slanted news coverage by MSM and “public” networks (NPR, PBS and local affiliates), including subliminal stoking of displeasure and outrage with one-sided coverage or coverage that attempts to discredit any opposing view.
(3) exponential application and control of mass communications through AI technology in both substantive information formats as well as visual manipulation and imaging.
Never was it more important for our populace (particularly our younger citizens) to be savvy, informed, perceptive, critical, and inquisitive about their sources of information.
@lin
Agreed, nothing can be added to your sentiment.
And though people are free to lie, we are equally free to call them out as much and as often as we like, and we should. Fathom that we were almost at the point of accepting biological sex can’t be scientifically determined; surely gravity or a round earth weren’t far behind.
The perpetrator’s, shall we say, ‘vintage’ and accompanying mentality, can’t be dismissed, either. The lack of consequential foresight on the part of this crowd is not the previously normal naiveté of youth. No, things really are different this time, and it behooves us all to pay attention. Even if they lack conscious malevolence, they also lack the ability to define or even comprehend the concept – it isn’t isolated.
wait there are people who believes polls?
The problem is not Rahil Prakash and his concocting and publishing phony poll results, nor is it the obvious fact that his “social experiment” is a blatant attempt to influence actual election results. The problem is the millions of lemming-like imbeciles who will vote for whomever they believe will win the election, with zero consideration of the issues or where the candidates stand on them. That ridiculous, absurd sh1t-sh0w is the direct result of the union infiltration of the US public education system, and the perversion of that system into an instrument of collectivist indoctrination.
How do you explain Defamation Law to a Constitutional professor claiming that lies are protected by the First Amendment?
Easy. Public frauds are redressed through lawsuits, not govt. prosecution. The First Amendment only restrains the prosecutor.
Why should political operatives seeking to dupe the electorate be tolerated? The consent of the governed is never to be obtained through trickery and deceit. A nation suffering from moral confusion along those lines is doomed to failure.
So long as it’s citizens bringing a lawsuit, we have a fully Constitutional means of deterring political falsehoods intended to sway our votes. Public Frauds lawsuits are the tool of choice.
The best advice these days is lead with skepticism of anything you read or hear. Consider the source. There are precious few sources that are reliable and honest. Ignore the rest.
When it comes to lying about military service, that needs to be outlawed. Risking your life for our nation is a very honorable thing to do. My dad’s youngest brother lied about his age the day after Pearl Harbor so that he could join his older brothers in enlisting in the US Navy. He was killed in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, three weeks before his 20th birthday. He’d honorably served for nearly 3 years aboard the USS Hoel. I am very offended when I hear about someone lying about having served in the US Armed Forces because they don’t have the patriotism to actually do it!
Interesting. The following quote showed up in my feed attributed to Orwell. I used two different sources and verified it wasn’t Orwell’s.
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
George OrwellSelwyn Duke, 2009Send the little peckerwood one-way to Liberia.
In the words of the insufferable Harry Reid……”I don’t regret that at all…..Call it whatever they want. “Romney didn’t win, did he?” ….one of the best things I’ve ever done’. The games afoot when the reins of power are the cards in play.
Trapper. Good reminder. And to think they named an airport after that liar and scoundrel.
Re: “and to think they named an airport after that liar and scoundrel…” Think back. Doesn’t history remind us that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter? It all depends upon whose ox is being gored.
Turley’s right on the law and stops one level short on the lesson.
He traces the failure chain to Prakash and to the outlets that ran his numbers without checking the source. Fair as far as it goes. But the chain doesn’t end at the newsroom. It ends at the citizen who reads a headline number and treats it as settled fact instead of one unverified claim among many.
Prakash said the quiet part himself: if you just make it look a bit pretty, it’s rather easy for it to spread. That’s not an indictment of the media. That’s an indictment of a public that responds to presentation instead of asking for method.
The First Amendment was built for a citizenry capable of doing that checking on its own. When that capacity erodes, the same legal architecture that worked fine in 1789 starts producing 2026-sized messes, and the instinct is always to blame the liar or the platform instead of the missing skill.
You can’t legislate your way out of a formation deficit. You can only rebuild the formation.
Under old fashioned Journalism standards Media would have been directly accountable for failing to confirm the accuracy of the Poll before running with the story that in any way endorsed the Poll’s findings. Sadly, today’s advocacy standard allows media to run whatever story adheres to its particular agenda.
In this case the media was pimping for the l Communists and those who hold the title of Democrat Socialists.
Yes the media is to blame and should be held accountable!
As long as the new breed of so called Journalists combine editorial efforts and call it “news” they are absolutely involved in the fraud that illegally influences elections.
Ralph, you’re right on the media accountability point and I’ll go further with you on it. Old standard: confirm before you run it. New standard: run it if it fits. Prakash didn’t beat rigorous fact-checking. He beat none, because the outlets that picked up his numbers wanted them to be true.
Where I’d push the chain one link further: the reader who saw that headline number and never asked for a second source. Media accountability and citizen accountability aren’t competing explanations, they’re the same failure at two different points in the same chain. An outlet that won’t verify and a public that won’t demand verification are propping each other up. Fix one without the other and you’ve patched half the problem.
Prakash said it himself: “if you just make it look a bit pretty, it’s rather easy for it to spread.” That’s an indictment of everybody who passed it along without checking, reporter and reader both.
Recall the Des Moines Register poll controversy in 2024.
Polling is a way to steer you from your current path, based on your own convictions, and onto the ‘desired’ path.
It’s to keep people from ‘deciding for themselves’.
What if one ignores polls? Then what path is one to take?
Polling relies on statistical science. Probability and statistics are sound tools for objective data. If you want to figure out the odds of winning the lottery, where the number of balls are known, it’s just a mathematial exercise. The odds will never change. If you put a known number of red and blue balls in a box, then it’s a simple math exercise to determine the probability of selecting a red ball. That probability will never change.
We’ve tricked ourselves into believing polling is like the probability of selecting a red ball. It’s nothing like that.
Humans lie. We change our minds on a whim. There is no mandatory requirement to participate in polls, which means the sample selected violates the necessity for randomness.
A fake poll can be a dangerous thing to the party it assists. It can cause the opposite reaction.
With the media, academics and now pollsters, the LAST thing you can do is sell your reputation. Like an inflated currency, people lose trust and it’s value diminishes.
Now, no one blindly trusts science, news, polls, etc. Americans have always been “buyer beware”. It’s our super power from the start: Distrust authority and act accordingly. Those that rely on others to do their thinking will be stuck as followers.
You realize you just repeated what Turley wrote.
BEHOLD!!!
Anonymous is debating himself again!
When is Turley going to ban the use of the name “Anonymous”. Some commenters are just too damned stupid to choose something unique and still remain anonymous. Morons.
This isn’t too surprising, or at least shouldn’t be. Pollsters have always been able to manipulate results based on how they sample the electorate. Choosing a sample that is +4 Democratic produces a different result than one that is +2 Democratic. Conservatives are know to avoid talking to pollsters. What exactly is a “likely voter” anymore? All that Prakash did is skip the steps that made the poll “scientific” and produce the desired result directly.
Leftys getting lazy with their propaganda. Insincere to the last.
Not leftys, (Its either Lefties or Leftists) but a single person, 21 year old. Kudos to him. He was not endorsed by the Leftists or Democrats.
“… just another liar among the Internet’s sad voyeurs, vipers, and vagabonds.”
Sums up the riffraff on this blog and you know who you are.
All of them named “Anonymous.”